Rebecca J. Caffrey’s Pole Position is a veteran/rookie contemporary romance set in the fast-moving world of Formula 1 motor racing. It’s not a sport I see written about all that often in romances (it’s only the second F1-set one I’ve read, although I know there are more out there) which is what attracted me to it, but while I liked the way the author writes about the sport itself – the technical aspects, the qualifiers, the teamwork, the preparation and training and so on – the romance is not particularly satisfying. It hits all the right beats of a rivals-to-lovers story, but it lacks – for want of a better word – warmth; there’s no real chemistry or emotional connection between the leads and the romance feels very rushed. Plus, a lot of page time is devoted to misunderstanding and miscommunication, which made it hard to like either of the protagonists until well into the story.

Four-times World Champion Kian Walker is at the pinnacle of his career. The son of a former racing legend (whom Kian has worked very hard not to emulate), he started racing in F1 when he was nineteen and his incredibly focused, meticulous and dedicated approach to the sport saw him rising quickly to the top. But, as happens to many athletes as they age, rumours are starting to circulate that, at thirty-three, Kian is thinking about retirement. He isn’t – or not in so many words, although he has been feeling for some time that he should be stepping up to help his sister and her husband, who have shouldered the bulk of the caring responsibilities for their mother (who has Parkinson’s Disease) – and the constant speculation that this will be his final season is pissing him off. More bad news comes in the form that his teammate, Elijah, has broken his leg and will be out for the season – and things go from bad to worse when the team principal tells him he’s called up Harper James from the lower category (I’m assuming this is F2 – if so, why not call it that?) to take Elijah’s place. Kian is Not Happy. He doesn’t know Harper well -they’ve only met briefly once or twice – but he’s everything Kian dislikes, a reckless, irresponsible party-boy whose drunken exploits feature frequently in the press and overshadow anything else he’s achieved in his career. Kian worries that having to be around him constantly – on planes, in locker rooms, in pits and simulators – is going to negatively affect his performance.

Harper James almost can’t believe it when he gets the call. He’s had his eye on making it into F1 for years, and this is his dream come true. And not only will he be competing with the big boys, he’ll be driving alongside Kian Walker, his motor-racing idol and the man who fuelled quite a few of Harper’s teenaged fantasies. His enthusiasm is curbed, however, when his idol proves to have feet of clay; Kian is a judgmental prick who shuts Harper down whenever he tries to be friendly or initiate a conversation and no matter what Harper says or does, it’s the wrong thing.

Things come to a head when their first joint interview goes wildly off the rails, and the two of them are ordered to do some media training – which Harper, aggrieved and defiant, doesn’t bother to go to. Needless to say, this cavalier attitude irritates Kian even more, and the more pissed off Kian is, the more annoying Harper gets.

For the first few chapters, I wanted to bang both their heads together. They jump to conclusions about each other very quickly and then dig their heels in; although I will say that the author does a pretty good job of showing us that they’re both as bad as each other in the misunderstandings stakes. Kian thinks Harper is too undisciplined and doesn’t take anything seriously (he’s not wrong, to be fair), and Harper thinks Kian is stuck up and regimented (again, not entirely unwarranted). I admit I found Kian easier to sympathise with because chaotic personalities like Harper set my teeth on edge – he has no sense of personal space or consideration for the needs of others, and I just couldn’t believe he had the necessary mental discipline to be a successful F1 driver. Kian isn’t blameless however, because he doesn’t bother to actually tell Harper that he needs his space and quiet time. And unfortunately, because Harper thinks Kian disdains him (which he does rather by this point) he continues to go out of his way to piss him off as much as he can.

This push-and-pull does eventually settle down as the season gets underway and Kian and Harper find themselves turning to each other through their various ups and downs. A tentative camaraderie begins to develop – which swiftly turns into a sexual relationship, but there’s so little build up I thought I must’ve missed a few chapters! It’s clear Harper has a bit of a residual crush on Kian but it takes a long time to see anything like reciprocal attraction from Kian, so when they hook up for the first time it feels like it happens out of the blue. And then (a few weeks on in terms of the timeline of the story, but actually in the next chapter or so) we find out they’ve fallen into a pattern of sleeping together every night (they’re sharing a trailer at this point), spooning, cuddling, sometimes having sex, sometimes not – but we never see any of this, we’re just told it’s become their routine.

Thing is, I did quite like them as a couple once they’re actually together. Harper starts getting his shit together and behaving more responsibly, and Kian gets to know more about why Harper is the way he is, that his tendency to self-sabotage stems from a childhood bouncing around foster homes after his parents abandoned him. Harper’s struggles to believe anybody could want him lead to the main point of conflict in the romance when Kian wants to talk about where they stand with each other and Harper just freaks out. His inability to communicate with Kian and his blow hot/blow cold behaviour becomes repetitive fast, and then he does something really horrible to get Kian to break up with him for good. By that point, I was starting to think Kian would be better off with someone else – which is never what I want to think when I’m reading a romance.

The other thing that bothered me is the number of plotlines that are introduced and then just dropped, never to be seen again. Someone from Harper’s past crawls out of the woodwork with video evidence of a foursome he had a couple of years back; Harper worries about it for a bit and then it just… goes away. Kian’s father seems to make an appearance with the sole purpose of saying something homophobic about his son, but the biggest plot hole is Kian spending almost all the book insisting he has no plans to retire – only to suddenly decide he’s ready to retire after all and eh, it’s no biggie.

All this is so frustrating, because the parts of the story that work – the races and everything that goes into them, the team camaraderie, the quieter, more intimate parts of the relationship between Kian and Harper, and the brief sections dealing with Kian’s family situation – work well, and the story itself has good bones. But the execution is off – there are big time jumps and wobbly transitions, and there is ultimately too much telling and not enough showing in the romance.

I suspect there may be a story in the works for Harper’s best friend Johannes and another of the secondary characters in this book, and if there is, I might pick it up. Pole Position is one of those books that has me on the fence; I can’t quite recommend it for the reasons I’ve stated, but I might be prepared to give the author another try to see if she can iron out some of the bugs that have tripped her up this time round.